1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information editing apparatus for editing a reproduction manner of a recorded information already recorded on an information storage medium, and an information reproducing apparatus for reproducing the recorded information in the manner edited by the information editing apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to an information editing apparatus for editing a reproduction manner of the recorded information including one or a plurality of picture information, and an information reproducing apparatus for reproducing the recorded information in the manner edited by the information editing apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
If recorded information such as a plurality of broadcast programs or the like (hereinafter, recorded information to be continuously reproduced will be referred to as a “program”) is recorded in a currently popular video tape recorder so that a user can select a target program desired to be viewed from the plurality of programs, it is necessary to find a leading portion of the target program by performing feed-forward or feed-back operation on the video tape and then start the reproduction therefrom.
However, this reproduction method is inconvenient in the cases where many programs are recorded on one video tape or where a recording time for each program is long even if the number of recorded program is small.
So, the following configuration is proposed in order to solve that disadvantage. That is, a recording position on a video tape, a recorded date, a channel (in a case of a broadcasted program) and the like are extracted for each recorded program. Then, those information for all recorded programs are collected and recorded at a leading area of the video tape as contents information. At the time of reproduction, the contents information is used to select the target program desired to be viewed. The reproduction apparatus searches for the recording position of the desired program by referring to the contents information, and then automatically starts the reproduction of the program.
However, in the above-mentioned conventional program searching method, only a character such as a title of each program and the like is recorded as the contents information. Therefore, it is quite inconvenient for a user who wants to grasp the whole contents of the recorded programs at a glance.
Also, in the above-mentioned conventional program reproducing method, the recorded programs can be reproduced only in a manner that they are originally recorded. Thus, a user cannot arbitrarily edit and view the recorded programs in a manner as he or she desires.